Today I have a chance to meet and learn more about drones from Allied Drones. I saw two displayed drones. The single rotor helicopter is the HL11 Atlas UAV, and the multirotor is the HL48 Chaos UAV. The single rotor helicopter looks solid and durable, and its fuselage is made of fiberglass, and it has an onboard first person view camera. With a weight between 25lb to 33lbs, it can travel at 40mph and flight time is about 60-150 minutes which is pretty impressive. The fuel it used is 89 octane gasoline, and the engine can be either 52cc or 80cc twin-piston 2-stroke engine and with single carburetor. It surely can do some heavy lifting.

The multirotor drone uses 8-12 cells battery to power its four sets of propellers and each propeller has a top and bottom blade design. This is more simple and inexpensive than the helicopter. However, because each prop moves independently from one another, one disadvantage is stability. Besides, top and bottom blades in each prop need to be balanced as well. If not, it will create unwanted vibration, and if you need to shoot with a camera, it leads to a "Jello" effect on the video and causes unnecessary wear and tear on the component on the drones. For this model, HL48 Chaos UAV, it can reach an airspeed of 30mph and best of all, it is autonomous and can be operated by a laptop. It can be easily foldable and transportable when motor booms are released.

Now there is a device for researchers and marketers to learn how you look at things. They want to know what catches your attention by looking and analyzing from the heat map generated by the data gathering from the glasses. It can be displayed on another viewing devices since the glasses is equipped with wireless capability. It has 4 cameras to catch the eye movement, and it has a visual field of 160 degrees horizontally. It also has a battery time of 120 minutes and weighted just 45 grams. The latest model is Tobii Glasses 2.

As we have advanced into the digital era from the industrial revolution, the speed of advancement has never been seen in the history of mankind. When we entered the 1970s, we have reached a point of no return in which the transistor count in computer's CPU is doubling every two years. This phenomenon was predicted similarly by Moore's law, which it states that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every 18 months.

With this increasing processing power, people are working to develop hyper-intelligent software that utilizes this processing power to create artificial intelligence (AI). From a long-term perspective, people teach the machine to acquire not only knowledge but the ability to think. Once AI can have the ability to do recursive self-improvement, it is possible to increase its intelligence exponentially and inevitably surpass humans. Like the human, depending on what personality the AI has, as soon as it becomes self-aware, it will think about itself and tries to sustain and survive. The next move from the self-aware machine is unpredictable.

In his paper, he gives a realistic warning about how the inescapable future may be, and self-aware killing machines will be self-turned on to destroy us all. It seems unavoidable because there is no trust between country to country, government to government since everyone wants to be the first to invent something more powerful than the previous invention. The military wants to deploy more destructive weapon and most efficient way to accomplish its military goal. Drones have been gained popularity recently in the news. We learned that they had the capability to identify a target and destroy it, whether or not a target is a person or an object. When drones combine with self-aware artificial intelligence, it will be a recipe for human destruction. It sounds like Skynet in the movie Terminator. With the recently purchased company called Boston Dynamics by Google, building a self-aware Terminator is closer than you think. We should incorporate our moral values into AI before it's too late.

Arthur Wang

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